Abstract
The technical project and STS research paper both examine automation and its effects on human labor, trust, and responsibility. The technical project, “Automating Revenue Cycle Engineering Workflows in Healthcare Systems,” focuses on how software automation can reduce repetitive work and improve reliability in healthcare revenue cycle management. During an internship at Ensemble Health Partners, the project involved testing an automated denial appeal packet generation system and developing tools for claim-status processing, code quality enforcement, and deployment notifications. These projects showed how automation can improve efficiency when it is carefully validated and used to support employees rather than replace human judgment.
The STS research paper, “Where the Line is Drawn: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Art,” examines how people debate AI in creative work. Through discourse analysis, the paper studies how artists, audiences, critics, companies, and institutions respond when AI appears to affect authorship, authenticity, or human effort. By comparing current AI debates to earlier controversies around photography, CGI, and Auto-Tune, the research argues that AI becomes most ethically troubling when it hides or replaces the labor of artists and performers.
Together, these projects show that automation is not only a technical issue. It also depends on whether people trust the system and whether human work remains visible. While the technical project highlights the benefits of automation in improving efficiency and consistency, the STS project reveals the risks of automation when it threatens human value, ownership, or authenticity. In both cases, automation works best when it supports people instead of making their labor invisible.
